29 januari 2010

More anti-file-sharing propaganda is one of the concrete proposals from the EU Commission in its initiative to set up an “IP Observatory”.

Last week, I took part when the European Parliament’s legal affairs committee JURI discussed the IP Observatory. It is supposed to combat all kinds of intellectual property violations, from commercial goods counterfeiting to illegal downloads from the Internet.

The IP Observatory has been heavily criticized by activist organizations like La Quadrature du Net. Basically, the Commission wants to set up an institution to hunt Internet file sharers, under the pretext of combating commercial goods counterfeiting.

The JURI committee is involved because we are to give an opinion on the IP Observatory. It is an initiative report, which means that we (the European Parliament) tell the Commission what we think they should do. It is a response to a communication from the Commission, where they told us that they had had this idea about an IP Observatory, and wanted to know what we though about it.

After the report has passed through the JURI committee it will be voted in plenary by the full European Parliament. The timetable is not quite set yet, but possibly during the session in April, possibly later.

Just like La Quadrature, I am highly critical of the proposal, as it

deliberately confuses commercial counterfeiting with file sharing,

calls for three-strikes legislation against Internet users,

recommends money to be spent on propaganda campaigns against file sharing,

encourages the Commission to conclude the controversial ACTA agreement, and

takes no notice of the fact excessive enforcement measures on the net can come into conflict with other interests, including our fundamental rights.

The IP Observatory proposal from the Commission follows the classical pattern. When they are arguing for this new institution, the Commission talks almost exclusively about commercial goods counterfeiting. But if the institution is ever created, we can be sure that it will spend most of its time on trying to fight non-commercial file sharing.

In the JURI committee in the Parliament, Marielle Gallo (EPP, France) is the rapporteur. This means that she is responsible for drafting the report where the committee expresses its opinion. The rapporteur plays an important role in the process of anything going through the European Parliament.

When she presented her draft report to the committee, she followed the same line as the Commission, and made no distinction between goods counterfeiting and file sharing. For example, she stressed the argument that piracy may put consumers at risk and pose health hazards. This is a perfectly legitimate concern when it comes to counterfeit pharmaceuticals sold on the net, and it is one of the reasons why we all want to combat that phenomenon.

But nobody in his right mind would claim that young people downloading films and music is a health hazard. Even i you think that most of what kids watch and listen to nowadays is rubbish, at least it isn’t that bad.

If the discussion is to be meaningful, we must try to keep it at least a little bit legally stringent. Commercial counterfeiting and file sharing are two different things.

“Information campaigns about the importance of copyright” would be one of the tasks of the IP Observatory.

This is a complete waste of money, and we all know it. The film- and record companies, sometimes together with various authorities and helped by public funding, have spent millions and millions on “information campaigns” for at least twenty years. During the same time, file sharing continued to grow exponentially.

Let us establish once and for all:

Anti-file-sharing propaganda does not work.

And how could it? The target audience for these “information” campaigns is usually the young generation, perhaps defined as those between 12 and 30. But they already have a far better understanding of the net and its possibilities than anybody who works with designing “information” at either the Commission or film- and record companies. They are the first digital natives, and no amount of propaganda or ”awareness campaigns” are going to change that.

Instead of suddenly changing their habits of a lifetime, as the Commission seems to think young people would do, they are simply laughing at the propaganda. The net is full of parodies and remixes of previous ”information” campaigns. And now the Commission wants to spend more of our tax money on making more of the same.

We may get a few laughs for our money, but other than that it seems utterly pointless to me.

Of course the lobbyists from the film- and record companies know this is ineffective. They are more interested in the other parts of the proposal: the recommendation to introduce new three-strikes legislation to shut people off the net, and to conclude the ACTA negotiations with the US.

This is the sharp end of the proposal. Three-strikes legislation is being introduced in various member states at this very moment. And although the ACTA negotiations are being carried out in secret, without even the European Parliament being informed by the Commission and the Council, we know from what has been leaked that the agreement is full of new repressive legislation against file sharers.

If the ACTA agreement goes through, there would have to be some body to oversee all this new activity directed against file sharers. The IP Observatory, if one is created along the lines that the Commission wants, would fit like a glove to fulfill this role. This is hardly a coincidence.

This is where it stops being funny. I wouldn’t steal a baby, or nuke a panda bear, or set fire to a naval dockyard, but I don’t mind watching funny clips on YouTube reminding me not to.

But I do mind having my fundamental rights, including my right to privacy and my right to receive and impart information without interference by public authority, reduced by, or ”balanced” against, the commercial interests of the entertainment industry of the previous century.

Fighting goods counterfeiting is fine. Fighting the future is not. Especially not at the price of our fundamental rights.

Gilla

26 januari 2010

The Spanish presidency of the EU has just started, and will last until the end of June.

Yesterday I was at a dinner in the European Parliament and listened Francisco Ros Peran, who is the Spanish secretary of state for telecommunications and information society. Unfortunately he neither has a blog, a home page nor a Wikipedia entry, but at least somebody has put a photo of him here.

I found it pretty depressing to listen to Mr. Ros Peran when he outlined the visions of the Spanish presidency. First a lot of pretty words about the importance of ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) as enabling factors for European business. I agree, but I sort of knew that already.

When it came to concrete action plans, Mr. Ros Peran stressed protection of intellectual property. ”We need new legislation to get young people to respect intellectual property. They think that everthing on the net is free,” he said, and gleamed with pride when he talked about the new laws that Spain will be introducing.

Technically, he is of course right when he says that Ipred is not working when it comes to reducing p2p file sharing. It isn’t. So in the age old tradition of politicians everywhere, if something isn’t working, do more of it. No real news there.

But he also said something that at least I had not heard before. Mr. Ros Peran and the Spanish EU presidency want to give the Internet ”the ability to forget”. What does that mean?

Not even China or Iran are able to make the net forget things they don’t like, even though they try. The Soviet Union was equally unsuccessful in altering history after the fact, and in those days there was not even an Internet. It may be true that nobody expects the Spanish inquisition, but I doubt that even they would have the means to achieve that goal.

When I asked the Spanish secretary of state if he had some concrete details about this he didn’t, which at least is some comfort. Let us hope that it was just an indication of how little the Spanish government understands about the net, and that nothing will come out of it.

But I still find it very disturbing that the current EU presidency is even thinking along those lines.

According to Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights we have the right ”to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers”.

The aim of this master thesis is to analyze how the Pirate Bay Trial could result in a boom for the online flower ecommerce business in Stockholm and the underlying factors explaining how a non-profit ecommerce–like website could be created and run successfully and effectively in a very short time. The prerequisite of the snowball effect in terms of common interests is discussed to deduce relevant implications regarding the ecommerce business. A SWOT analysis focusing on social media and traditional media facilitates the understanding of the role of social media in the case and how it can be applied in e business. The relationship between the online community and social media technology is analyzed, resulting in the conclusion that social media is the catalyst for the snowball effect and the online community is the roll booster.

Gilla

18 januari 2010

The Pirate Party does not want to abolish copyright; we want to reform it. This is why and how.

Today’s copyright laws are out balance, and out of tune with the times. It has turned the entire young generation into criminals in the eyes of the law, in a futile attempt at stopping the technological development. Yet, file sharing has continued to grow exponentially. Neither propaganda, fear tactics, nor ever harsher laws have been able to stop development.

File sharing is when two private individuals send ones and zeros to eachother. The only way to even try to limit file sharing, is to introduce complete surveillance of everybody’s private communication. There is no way to separate private messages from copyrighted material without opening the message and checking the contents. Out goes the postal secret, the right to communicate in private with your lawyer or your web-cam flirt, or your whistle-blower protection if you want to give a sensitive story to a journalist.

We are not prepared to give up our fundamental rights to enforce today’s copyright. The right to privacy is more important than the right of big media companies to continue to make money in the same way as before, because the latter right does not even exist.

Today’s copyright also prevents or restricts many new and exciting cultural expressions. Sampled music on MySpace, remixes on YouTube, or why not a Wikipedia filled with lots of pictures and music in the articles? Copyright legislation says no.

The copyright laws must either be reformed or abolished outright. The Pirate Party advocates the reform alternative.

We want to set all non-commercial copying and use free, and we want to shorten the commercial protection time. But we want to keep the commercial exclusivity in a way that allows most business models that are viable today to continue to work.

The Pirate Party’s proposal can be summarized in five points:

No changes to the moral rightsWe propose no changes at all to the moral rights of the author, i.e.: the right to be recognized as the author, and his right to say no if he feels offended.If somebody has taken a picture of his county’s flag over a beautiful (presumably national) landscape, and some neo-nazis use it on their web page, he should have the same right as today to have the picture removed by referring to his moral rights.

Nobody should be allowed to claim that they are ABBA, or have written all of Bono’s songs. To the extent that this is a real world problem, it should still be illegal to do so. ”Give credit where it’s due” is a good maxim that everybody agrees with.

Free non-commercial useUp until twenty years ago, copyright was hardly anything that concerned ordinary people. The rules about exclusivity on the production of copies where aimed at commercial actors, who had the means to, for exmple, print books or press records.

Private citizens who wanted to copy poem and send to their loved one, or copy a record to cassette and give it to a friend, did not have to worry about being in breach of copyright. In practice, anything you had the technical means to do as a normal person, you could do without risk of any punishment.

But today, copyright has evolved to a position where it imposes serious restrictions on what ordinary citizens can do in their every-day life. As technological progress has made it easier for ordinary people to enjoy and share culture, copyright legislation has moved in the opposite direction.

The Pirate Party wants to restore copyright to its origins, and make absolutely clear that it only regulates copying and for commercial purposes. To share copies, or otherwise spread of use somebody else’s copyrighted work, should never be prohibited if it is done non-commercially and without a profit motive. Like, for example, file sharing.

Five years of commercial exclusivityMuch of today’s entertainment industry is built on the commercial exclusivity on copyrighted works. This, we want to preserve. But today’s protection times — life plus 70 years — are absurd. No investor would even look at a business case where the time to pay-back was that long.

We want to shorten the protection time to something that is reasonable from both society’s and an investor’s point of view, and propose five years from publication.

Free sampling — codified ”fair use”Today’s ever more restrictive copyright legislation and practice is a major obstacle to musicians, film makers, and other artists who want to create new works by reusing parts of existing works.

We want to change this, so that the default rule becomes that it is legal to create new works out of existing ones. To the extent one wants to limit certain forms of commercial adaptions, like for example translations of new literature or the use of new music in films, these restrictions should be explicitly enumerated in the law.

A ban on DRMDRM is an acronym for ”Digital Restrictions Management”. The term is used to denote a number of different technologies that all aim to restrict consumers’ and citizens’ ability use and copy works, even when they have a legal right to do so.

We want to introduce a ban on DRM technologies in the consumer legislation. There is no point in having our parliaments introduce a balanced and reasonable copyright legislation, if at the same time we allow the big multinational corporations to write their own laws, and enforce the through technical means.

This is what the Pirate Party proposes.

The proposal is completely in line with ideas that have been voiced in the international debate, such as Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture or Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks. This is bigger than just the question of how the current big rights holders should should continue to make money. This is about which kind of society we want.

”But how should the artists get paid, if file sharing is set free?” is the question that always comes up in the discussion.

Well, ”how” is not really for us to say as politicians. To find a business model that works for him is up to the individual entrepreneur, in the cultural sector just like in any other industry. But we are certain that the cultural sector as a whole will continue to do well, and this of course makes us happy.

In the economic statistics, we can see that household spending on culture and entertainment is slowly increasing year by year. If we spend less money on buying CD records, we spend more on something else, like for instance going to live concerts. This is great news for the artists. An artist will typically get 5-7% of the revenues from a CD record, but 50% of the revenues from a concert. The record companies lose out, but this is only because they are no longer adding any value.

It may well be that it will become more difficult to make money within some parts of the cultural sector, but if so, it will become easier in some other — including new ones, that we have not even imagined so far. But as long as the total household spending on culture continues to be on the same level or rising, nobody can claim that the artists as a group will have anything to lose from a reformed copyright.

Should this also have the side effect of loosening up some of the grip that the big distributors have over cultural life, then so much the better for both ”artists” and ”consumers”.

Gilla

12 januari 2010

The confirmation hearings with the new EU commissioners are currently under way in the European Parliament. It is not really a setting where you expect surprises, at least not positive ones. But I think there was one today in the hearing with commissioner designate Viviane Reding.

Ms. Reding is being proposed for the portfolio of ”Justice, Fundamental Rights and Citizenship”. As a member of the European Parliament’s legal affairs committee JURI, I got the chance to ask her a question today.

I had planned to ask her about the pending IPRED2 directive, which deals with criminal sanctions for intellectual property infringements. Just like its predecessor IPRED1 (which is already in force) it is a very bad directive that makes no distinction between commercial goods counterfeiting on the one hand, and non-commercial file sharing of copyrighted material on the other.

To mix up these two issues and treat them as one, is one of the standard techniques that the copyright lobby has used to get both the EU and national parliaments to introduce draconian measures aimed at file sharers, under the guise of trying to combat goods counterfeiting (which even we pirates agree is a bad thing). I have written about this mix-up earlier, in the context of another proposal that was being discussed in the JURI committee some months ago.

Before it was my turn to ask my question, however, Ms. Reding made some very interesting remarks in response to a question from another member. She said that she wanted to come forward with an initiative to combat goods counterfeiting, but she stressed that it should be about counterfeiting only, and that non-commercial copyright infringement (i.e.: file sharing) should not be part of that initiative.Instead of the question that I had intended to ask Ms. Reding (which was about the legal basis of IPRED2 and its impact on fundamental rights), I said that I was very encouraged by the response that she had given earlier, and asked if this new initiative to combat counterfeiting should be seen as a replacement for IPRED2.

Unfortunately I didn’t get a very clear answer to that question, and the impression I got was that Ms. Reding was not really aware of the IPRED2 directive, at least not off the top of her head. Considering that the directive has been stalled in first reading in the Council of Ministers for several years by now, that is perhaps understandable. It is a directive that deserves to be forgotten, so if that has already happened, I certainly have no objections.😉

But the fact that Ms. Reding was making such a clear distinction between counterfeiting and file sharing is a very good sign in itself. If this leads to IPRED2 being scrapped by the Commission remains to be seen, but maybe there is a chance.

This would be a good thing not only from a pirate perspective, but also for those stakeholders that have a genuine interest in combating counterfeiting, rather than just hunting file sharers at any cost.

It is far too early to open any champagne bottles to celebrate the death of IPRED2, but today’s hearing was still very encouraging. Things may be moving in the right direction.